


Edited to Add

by Desiderii



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/M, M/M, Multi, Oral Sex, Sharing a Bed, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:27:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desiderii/pseuds/Desiderii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pepper, Steve, and Tony are on assignment in the Midwest, it's damn fucking hot, and their safehouse apartment is barely big enough for one.</p><p>A sci-fi dystopian AU with one of my favorite OT3s. This is for the 'Sharing a Bed' square on my Trope Bingo card.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Edited to Add

The quiet of the wee hours of the morning descended on his already sleepless night, and Tony laid awake, staring at the crackling plaster and running calculations in his head. He was tired. The math kept changing in the way that math wasn’t supposed to, and if he were more coherent he’d be able to tell whether or not he needed to win some sort of prize for his magnificent new proof or just shoot himself to take care of the insomnia. His ‘day’ was soon, and he’d normally be fine with taking the batshit early shift, but he hadn’t slept for at least twenty-four.

The safehouse was a shitty little hole-in-the-wall down off of Colfax, and it was roughly the size of a postage stamp. The partition between the toilet and the rest of the place made it a step up from the last safehouse, but there was only one bed and it wasn’t even a twin bed. It was a cot, and no matter how Tony elbowed the whisper-thin mattress, it didn’t get any more comfortable. His toes rested flush against the wall, he knocked his head whenever he tried to adjust his pillow, and he had bruises on his elbow from trying to turn over at night and failing. If he were claustrophobic, this assignment would be torture.

Light shone through the sagging blinds with the steady regularity of a busy street and the near thrum of traffic didn’t quite drown out the rattle of the swamp cooler. Late summer hunched over the city like a fat man dripping over a sauna brazier, and the threadbare handkerchief that passed for his blanket was already damp and clingy with sweat. He dragged his from his body and discarded it on the floorboards. His sleep shirt followed a moment later.

Shift change was coming up. So was his wakeup call. Damp, hot air blew across his skin and did little for the anticipation. Slow arousal burnt through his limbs, left him heavy and lightheaded and hard. His lips and fingertips tingled. 

Somewhere below, a dog barked, a car door shut, and a creak sounded from the third step on the staircase leading up to the apartment. Tony didn’t bother to pretend to be asleep, just palmed himself through his boxers. A key scraped in his lock and the bolt slid free with a heavy, hollow noise, loud in the dark. The muggy air shifted as the door opened. The whole room shuddered when it closed. Fan-blades in the swamp cooler clicked against the frame. 

Tony tipped his chin up and closed his eyes as the edge of the cot dipped. Nylon whispered against the fabric of his boxers. She straddled him, grinding against his arousal, and leaned down for a kiss. Her lips were cool, tasted faintly of vodka and grenadine, but her breath came in pants. Her skin beneath his fingers as he skimmed the curve of her hip, the inside of her thigh, was hot to the touch. 

“Someone bought you a drink,” he said, amused. He ran his thumbs across the elastic along the top of her stockings, brushed the garter straps keeping them up. Bare skin met his explorations when he went seeking obstacles. She wore a short skirt rucked up past her hips and little else. His fingers brushed her clit and she dipped to give him another kiss. “You could have stayed with them tonight. Had a bed.”

“And kept you waiting?” she said. A low flirtation, husky, as she tugged his boxers down past his hips, lowered herself onto him. 

Tony rolled his hips, the night too warm, and breathed Pepper’s name.

**

Pepper’s alias burnt to a crisp and her new one wasn’t done yet. Identity took time and blood. “Her face and name weren’t supposed to need to stand up to this much scrutiny,” Tony complained to the safehouse wall. Layers of peeled wallpaper - blue, green, blue again - had picked up the stains of tobacco and bleach and opened veins over the years. Tony’s last computer had added fire damage, and blackened bubbles of roasted glue licked their way up from his desk. 

A radio somewhere in the complex played swing. The speaker popped and spat, but the tinny strains of something catchy enough to set Tony’s toe to tapping were loud enough to hear over the swamp cooler and a too-close firetruck. Tony kept his eyes on the screen, chafed and cursed at the keyboard and the computational speed, and ignored the sirens. The only smoke he could smell was old. 

The door opened and shut and Tony had been meaning to get up and lock it and get some sleep. Broad, warm hands closed on Tony’s shoulders and he let his fingers relax off the keyboard. He sighed, leaned back to rest his head against warm muscle and damp cotton, and sighed again. Takeout Chinese filled the apartment with the scent of fried vegetables.

“Tony.” Warm. Amused. Deep. “You didn’t take your shift. Again.” 

“Steve,” Tony, flippant, returned the greeting. He swiveled and he pulled away from Steve’s grip to turn and stare up the plane of his chest to his face. “Midday shifts really aren’t my forte.” 

“Neither are evening, graveyard or morning.” Steve dropped to his knees in front of Tony’s chair and leaned in to look him in the eyes. There was barely room. The backs of his thighs rested on the frame of the cot. He reached out to take Tony’s chin in a light grip and asked, “What was it today?” 

Tony could feel the knots in his shoulders ease at Steve’s touch. “Pepper burned like I said she would for weeks. She’s taking the opportunity to check in with Central as we speak, and I want to have her new ID by the time she gets back. I just- It’s slow going with this shit.” He gestured at his computer. Ancient monitor, mechanical keyboard kludged together from a typewriter and a old touchpad, a snarl of wires leading into the side of a slick chrome box larger than Tony’s head. “It’s no Gaianet. I feel like I’m groping around blind with half a brain. And then I have to remote integrate.”

Steve, all broad shoulders and chiseled features, solid and blonde and square-jawed, just gave Tony a slow nod and asked, “Will it be enough?” 

With a nod, Tony let out his breath. “Yeah.” He shoved both hands through his hair and gripped his skull. “Should be. The city’s database is a good month behind the rest of the US at least. If I update Pepper soon as she gets back into zone, we’ll only need to worry about the synths who know her personally.”

“So we stay.” Steve said. Releasing his chin, Steve tugged Tony’s hands free of his hair and pinned them to the arms of his chair. He pressed a kiss to Tony’s mouth and the chair rolled with the sudden weight to thud hard against the computer desk. The monitor rattled and died with a spark and Tony laughed against Steve’s lips. 

“We stay.” Tony pulled back to speak and unplug the monitor to prevent another preventable fire. “You owe me a new set.” 

The zipper of Tony’s jeans caught a little on the fabric of his boxers. His breath grew shallow, his pulse in his dick by the time Steve took advantage of the access. Tony gripped Steve’s hair and bit his lip against the feel of tongue along the underside of his length. The slow, casual motion sent a shudder through him that set Steve laughing. Screws from the backrest of the worn chair dug into Tony’s spine and he tried to remind himself that the walls were barely thicker than the plastered layers of wallpaper.

**

There was no way to tell if the reconnaissance wyrm was a success or a failure, and right now Tony didn’t care. The wyrm writhed beneath the skin of his chest, a living tattoo plugged into his nervous system. Bolts of pleasure laced with pain shuddered through his gut enough to make it hard to breathe. Blue light bled into his vision and washed out the ambient color pallet of reality. It stained the skin of his chest and set it glowing. Daylight, hotter than usual, beat on the black cotton stretched across his shoulders. Wrong shirt to wear today even if it was the thickest one he had. The wyrmglow was visible anyway. 

He left one soggy footprint every time he placed his right foot.

Nobody paid attention to his chest, not with his hand pressed hard to his groin as he walked down the street. Each sideways glance was followed by the deliberate snub of synth snobbery against involuntary biologics. None of them would ever be caught anywhere near an erection they hadn’t planned a week in advance. 

They should be snubbing him for his wiring. The data-heavy wyrm proved just how bad a job he’d managed. He wasn’t prone to praying, not really, but the whole pantheon got a quick mention in his litany. Patron Goddess of sharp-edged women with freckles in hard-to-kiss places. Patron God of men who could lift him up to fuck him against the wall. There was a patron for him out there, somewhere, for men shot through with too much metal and too much alcohol and too many thoughts to lie quietly in the dark. He prayed to them too - whichever deity they were - that whoever was on shift in the cot wouldn’t mind the awakening. He needed his computer and hands on his dick - his, someone else’s, didn’t matter.

The third step creaked beneath his tread and he was home, blissfully un-arrested for public lewdness and flaunting of biologics. The locked sprung beneath his fingers and he shoved into the dark apartment. The blinds down, light striped the desk and cot and Steve’s broad back as he thrust into Pepper.

“Oh, thank god.” He braced himself on the thin wall to catch his breath, a hell of a lot more religious than he had been at the bottom of the stairs. “Someone was listening.”

“Someone?” and that was Pepper’s voice, out of breath and worried. He heard the light smack of a palm on flesh. Profanity like churchbells followed Steve as Pepper disentangled herself and reached out. Cotsprings complained in groans of over-stretched metal. “Were you caught?” 

Tony shut the door behind him and threw the bolt, thumb digging into the soft flesh at the crease of his thigh. “Don’t let me interrupt.” He took a breath, steeled himself, and dragged his t-shirt over his head. The wyrmglow projected shifting blue patterns on the walls, the computer, and the cot where Steve held himself naked over Pepper. Air did little to sooth the stain of light across his chest and the burn of arousal. “Please, god, don’t stop on account of me. Just- be there in a minute.” He motioned desperately, a broad circular gesture of ‘keep going’. “It will take me two seconds.” 

He threw himself into his computer chair, slammed his shin into the edge of the cot with a clatter that made Pepper wince, and keyed in the siphon. The draw of data from beneath his skin lanced the worst of the pain, the embedded matrices venting blue and returning to dormant. The siphon cast rippled light on three faces. Two of which still watched him curiously and not at all resuming where they’d left off. 

The tension drained along with the data, and left behind was the heat of crossed-wires, adrenaline, and triumph. “Got it,” Tony said, and he spun the chair to grin at the other two. Light flowed up and over his shoulder as the siphon progressed. The set flickered behind him, darks and lights and grays for ones and zeros and maybes, and it was too hot to be wearing as many clothes as he was. 

Pepper slipped from the cot and helped with his belt, deft and sure. She coaxed him out of the chair and to his feet. Behind her, Steve crowded in to press her bodily against Tony, and they fell together back toward the cot. The springs strained at Steve’s weight as he caught Pepper. Tony braced himself on the wall and claimed a kiss from each.

There was no room to move, the cot was sharp and uncomfortable, but the siphon finished and the desk set soon pulsed blue in time with the rapid thump of Tony’s heart. Steve, back against the wall, arms wrapped tight around Pepper, held them all steady as Tony trailed kisses between her breasts. 

“What are-?” Pepper struggled to speak, her question reduced to staccato syllables by the Steve’s fingers on her nipples. Tony nipped at her belly and she swatted his mouth away from her skin with a breathy laugh. “Did it work?”

Tony knelt on the floor next to the cot, his knees on their grubby blanket. He could feel the bruises already. His belt hung open, his jeans low on his thighs, his dick bobbing as he leaned to punctuate his words with kisses to the fingers toying with Pepper’s breasts. “The insert was a success. Somewhere there’s a brand new you in the system, all official-like.” 

The kisses Steve marched down the slope of Pepper’s shoulder sounded loud in the tiny apartment, tiny wet smacks that made her laugh as she dug her fingers through Tony’s hair and dragged her nails along the angle of his jaw. “Where’s your shoe?” Steve buried his face into her back and his laugh rumbled through her. Her grip on Tony tightened and she gently tugged his chin to bring his eyes up to hers. “Why only one shoe?” 

“My shoe?” Tony asked, part teasing and part incredulous. He curled his fingers around her hips, stroked her and used his thumbs to smooth her legs apart. “Really? Right now is the time to worry about a shoe?” 

“Just curious,” she said, her smile light in her words.

Tony lifted his hands from her and stroked Steve instead. A grin bloomed across his face at her noise of protest. Steve sighed against her back and Tony said, “You know what they say about curiosity. The bane of many a cat.”

Unimpressed, Pepper dusted her thumb across his stubble. “Satisfaction brought her back.” 

“Then-,” Steve said. His words were low and muffled and exasperated. “-how about we skip the curiosity and go straight for the satisfaction?”

“Curiosity later,” Tony agreed. He bent to Pepper.

“Later,” said Pepper in a gasp.

Steve’s shifted on the cot and it creaked and rattled, metal against loose metal. He punctuated the sound of Tony’s chuckles with his satisfied, “Later.”


End file.
